Collaboration takes place whenever humans and/or computer applications work together to accomplish a common goal or compatible goals. For the last two decades, many organizations and individuals have considered electronic collaboration of distributed teams one way to achieve higher productivity and improve the quality of their work products. Various collaboration technologies have been introduced to provide solutions in the areas of electronic communication, coordination, and content sharing. However, comprehensive solutions that fully realize the promises of electronic collaboration remain an elusive goal.
Early efforts for developing software systems to support asynchronous collaboration were carried out by research projects in CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work). While such research efforts resulted in products that penetrated the market, such as Lotus Notes, these early groupware products failed to deliver anything more than marginal improvements to existing e-mail and document management solutions. In the late 1990's, the basic ideas found in early tools for asynchronous and synchronous collaboration where adopted by web browsers and through this path they have impacted the work habits of many people.
Today, technology and tools aimed to support team collaboration are being introduced in many product areas in the software industry. New web-based groupware systems, such as Groove and NetMeeting, extend the basic web browser capabilities by providing joint activity tools (e.g., audio communication, instant messaging, and content sharing tools). Traditional groupware vendors provide software products (e.g., Lotus Sametime and QuickPlace) supporting more specialized collaboration activities such as electronic presentations and meetings. Standalone workflow systems (e.g., Staffware) and workflow engines embedded in EAI platforms (e.g., Vitria, TIBCO, BEA) and ERP systems (e.g., SAP), already support efficient coordination of prescribed collaboration activities and begin to introduce flexible workflows to support a combination of repetitive and ad hoc/optional collaboration activities. Vendors of enterprise-wide content management servers (e.g., Documentum, Vignette, OpenMarket, BroadVision, FileNET) are introducing new products that include basic tools for electronic collaboration. Finally, domain-specific tools for collaborative design, learning, and product data management are steadily gaining new users and entering new markets.
The landscape of products and the number of technologies aiming to support collaboration are expanding and the collaboration technologies are improving. However, the current collaboration tool landscape is fragmented, and the network infrastructure currently cannot effectively support some collaboration tools, such as basic tools for screen and application sharing. The fragmentation of the collaboration tool landscape is due to various reasons such as the fact that none these technologies provides a complete collaboration solution by itself. Different technologies and products offer different subsets of capabilities and tools. Furthermore, since the majority of the provided tools are general purpose, it may be necessary to develop application-specific tools and user interfaces, e.g., for intelligence gathering.
The scalability, and therefore the size of distributed electronic teams, that current technologies can support varies significantly. In particular, many groupware tools that support joint activities are only appropriate for small groups (i.e., teams of less than ten people). On the other hand, technologies that scale well, e.g., systems for content and workflow management, lack essential groupware tools.
Production workflow systems are known. In some workflow systems, workflow is a structured into instances and in a large a structured workflow system, thousands of workflow instances might be processed daily. Workflow might also be done using unstructured methods. Unstructured methods include spontaneous interactions, such as might be done with e-mail, chat, telephone, etc. The former works well to coordinate a large group and the latter works well in an informal, small group of collaborators.
Structured workflow has advantages of being trackable and testable. Structured workflow is trackable in that an analyst can later determine how a process proceeded and can identify other performance data and data underlying the work being done. Unstructured workflow, on the other hand, does not have these benefits and analysis might require manually reviewing e-mails, notes, etc. and would not be informed by informal interactions and communications that are not stored in retrievable form.
Unstructured workflow does have its advantages, in that the collaborators are not tied to a structure devised by an administrator. Of course, this might be a disadvantage, as an administrative team would more likely have the expertise and time to design a workflow optimized for the project at hand. In some cases, collaborators within a structured workflow system might use informal channels, such as manual routing, e-mail, etc., to bypass the structured workflow, but then the utility of the structure is diminished.